CHAPTER EIGHT

SHE was glad that nothing had happened. Of course she was. But, even though Davina had told herself the same thing over and over again in the four days since she had had supper with Matt, she still seemed to need to reassure herself as to their veracity.

And why? Why did she need to mentally repeat the words over and over again, as though they were some kind of protective chant? Why, when she knew she had done the right thing, did she wake up in the night, her body aching with a tension that refused to be ignored or suppressed? Why did she constantly think about the small sitting-room of Matt’s cottage, the sharp, clean taste of the wine he had poured her, the rich taste of the food, sensual pleasures that could, if she had chosen to let them, have led to even greater pleasures?

She imagined Matt holding her, kissing her, undressing her. She imagined them sharing a single glass of wine, Matt licking the drips from her skin, his tongue hard and warm, and as she was caught up in the helpless spiral of her own arousal she was also filled with the most acute sense of shame and guilt.

She wanted him. She could not pretend to herself any more that she didn’t. But she was ashamed of that wanting, ashamed of her own need, and she was ashamed as well that he had recognised it.

But the ache inside her still refused to go away, even though she worked herself so hard that she ought to have been too physically exhausted to do anything other than fall into a grateful numbing sleep.

On the day Matt was due to do the garden she went out shopping. There was no point in putting herself in the path of temptation, she told herself bitterly, not when she apparently had so little self-control.

Her father was still away on holiday, but Gregory had come home early for once, surprising her by arriving just as she was unpacking her shopping.

She was just about to ask him what he wanted for supper when the phone rang. To her surprise, he said instantly, ‘I’ll get it,’ lifting the receiver and then keeping his back to her so deliberately and pointedly that she knew he expected and wanted her to leave the room. Automatically she did so. There was, after all, nothing to be gained from antagonising him.

The phone call was brief, but when he came into the kitchen his face was slightly flushed, and she immediately recognised the air of scarcely suppressed excitement that made his eyes glitter so betrayingly.

‘I shan’t be in for supper after all,’ he told her. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

She knew, of course. How could she not do? Although it wasn’t his usual practice to allow his women to telephone him at home, perhaps because he was afraid her father might take the call.

She said nothing—what was the point?—but there was a bitter, corrosive taste in her mouth as he drove away. Not because his obvious infidelity hurt her. She had sealed off those feelings years ago. No, it was his total lack of any attempt to treat her with courtesy or compassion that galled her so bitterly.

He didn’t care whether or not she guessed what was going on, she recognised. He didn’t care enough for her, nor respect their marriage enough to even attempt to pretend or to conceal the truth from her.

She didn’t go to Matt then. She couldn’t. She felt too raw, too sore emotionally and mentally, but as she lay sleepless in bed she remembered him telling her that she was an adult, that she could make her own choices, and suddenly she wondered what was worse: despising herself for craving the physical possession of another man, or despising herself because she didn’t have the courage the guts, to accept that she was a human being with every human being’s frailties and with the right to choose for herself whether or not she would indulge those frailties.

If she had an affair with Matt, who would it harm? Who would it hurt? Would giving in to the physical need he aroused within her really be any more contemptible than living with a man who treated her the way Gregory treated her?

Which was really the more dishonest: allowing herself to admit that she wanted Matt, or allowing herself to be used the way Gregory used her?

She was not a girl, a teenager any more; she was a woman. A woman—she smiled mirthlessly to herself. She was no woman … not really … not inside. But with Matt she could learn to be … with Matt she could discover what it really meant to be a woman. With Matt …

Was that really what she wanted, a brief, transitory affair with a man who did not love her and whom she herself did not love?

But what was love? There were many different ways of loving, and in Matt she had recognised a man who did love her sex in a way that men like Gregory and her father never could.

She knew any relationship she might have with Matt could never be permanent. He was a wanderer, she had already recognised that even if he had not stressed it to her. But he would never deliberately hurt her … and he would certainly never abuse her, either emotionally or physically.

So what was holding her back? Surely only a lack of honesty, a lack of the courage to look closely at herself and to admit that she wanted him. Any time you want or need me, he had said, and she told herself grimly that she only hoped he had meant it.

At least she wouldn’t have to explain the purpose of her call, she reflected as she got in her car and fastened her seatbelt. Eleven o’clock in the evening was hardly the usual time to make a conventional social visit.

As she drove towards the cottage half of her was hoping that he would be there and half of her was praying that he wouldn’t. She had been rehearsing over and over again what she would say to him, but in the end there was no need for words.

He must have seen her arrive because he had opened the door before she had stopped the car, coming across the yard to open the car door for her, the touch of his hand on her cold, tense arm warm and reassuring as he helped her out and said simply, ‘Davina … I was just thinking about you.’

She waited until they were inside to speak to him, taking a deep breath and then saying quickly, ‘I’ve come because … because I’d … I’d like you to make love to me.’

Was that really admiration she could see in his eyes? There was certainly tenderness in his touch as he held her arm, tenderness and sympathy, as though he knew how hard she had to fight to confront her need with honesty and to admit it to him.

Very gently he led her further inside the cottage. The familiarity of the small sitting-room helped to ease her tension, as did the calm, easy way Matt was holding her hand, his thumb brushing gently against her knuckles, soothing and relaxing her a little.

He hadn’t said anything in response to her statement and in another man she might have taken this as a sign that he no longer wanted her, but not with Matt. Somehow she knew that that kind of cowardice, that kind of cruelty, was not part of him.

Now, as the nervous trembling of her body died down a little with the hurdle over of actually telling him why she had come to him, he turned her towards him and told her, ‘You’re a very courageous woman, Davina, and—even more rare—a very honest one.’

‘Honest?’ Her face mirrored her disagreement. How can I be honest when I’m about to break my marriage vows? she wanted to ask him, but she couldn’t frame the words, didn’t want to be guilty in her own eyes of thrusting the responsibility for her decision on to him instead of taking it upon herself.

‘Yes. Honest,’ Matt persisted gravely as he raised her hand to his mouth, palm upwards. The light brush of his lips made her stomach quiver with nervous anticipation but that was nothing to the sensation she felt when his tongue began to lightly trace erotic circles against her skin.

How on earth was she going to cope when he touched her more intimately, when merely the touch of his tongue against her palm had this effect on her? she wondered faintly.

‘Honest,’ Matt repeated huskily. ‘And very, very desirable.’ His lips caressed the inside of her wrist, and she couldn’t hold back the tremors of pleasure any longer.

Instinctively she leaned towards him, her body unfamiliarly pliant. Before he finally kissed her he slid his hands into her hair, letting it slide luxuriously through his fingers.

‘It feels like silk,’ he told her huskily. ‘And your body will feel and look like the finest French satin, rich and soft, gleaming in the light.’

She had started to shiver, unable to hide the effect his words were having on her, her eyes huge and dark, mirroring all that she was feeling.

His hands touched her face, the pads of his fingers slightly rough against her skin. The sensation of being touched by him was so acutely pleasurable that she forgot to be apprehensive and self-conscious.

When his mouth touched hers her lips parted automatically, her body instinctively seeking the warmth and proximity of his. It wasn’t a passionate, demanding kiss, but rather one of greeting and welcome, a slow, gentle exploration of her mouth, which allowed her senses to absorb the taste and pleasure of him. His hand supported her neck, his thumb stroking gently just behind her ear. She could feel the pleasure filling her in a slow, warm tide, relaxing her, restoring to her the feminine self-confidence, the ability to believe in her sensuality, which Gregory had taken from her.

Slowly Matt released her, kissing her mouth briefly and rather hard before telling her huskily, ‘I think this calls for another bottle of Uncle Paolo’s wine, don’t you?’ He led her over to the settee and pushed her gently on to it before excusing himself, ‘A fitting celebration of a very, very special event.’

As he went to get the wine, Matt admitted that it wasn’t to celebrate her coming to him that he was delaying things a little, not even purely to help her relax and push aside the crippling burdens her husband had placed on her sexuality, so much as to help him retain enough self-control to ensure that he could lead her gently and carefully through this all-important threshold into true awareness and appreciation of her sensuality.

He had known that ultimately they would be lovers; but he admitted that he had not expected her to come to him like this; that he had not recognised how fine and brave her spirit actually was.

As he uncorked the wine he realised that, had he been a man who wanted permanence and only one woman, Davina James could very, very easily have been that woman.

When he came back he handed one glass to Davina and then raised his own in a brief toast. ‘To you, Davina.’

As she drank she trembled a little so that the wine spilled over the side of her glass and down on to her hand, and immediately she remembered how she had fantasised about Matt licking it from her skin, and her face grew hot at the memory. What would Matt say if she told him about that fantasy? Would he laugh at her or would he …?

Matt had emptied his own glass, and now he was reaching for hers, taking it from her, drawing her to her feet and into his arms.

He made love to her slowly and carefully, and with an awareness of her fears and lack of self-confidence which she only later recognised. When he undressed her he allowed her to keep herself half concealed from him in the shadows. When he caressed her body his touch was soothing, stroking, coaxing her body to relax, not asking anything of her other than that she allow him to show her pleasure.

Her senses numbed by the years of Gregory’s contempt and malice, Davina was too aware of her own inexperience anyway to reach out and touch him; too conscious of her lack of ability and knowledge. It was ridiculous that a woman married for as long as she had been had no real awareness of how to arouse a man; of how to touch or caress him.

As he stroked her Matt spoke to her, soft, soothing words of praise and appreciation, which at first startled and confused her. Gregory never spoke when they had sex, and he had certainly never, as Matt was doing, told her that the taste of her skin reminded him of the warmth of the Greek sunshine, nor that when she trembled as he touched her it made him feel as powerful and omnipotent as a Roman god.

‘Look what you’re doing to my body, Davina,’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘Feel how hard you make me, how hungry for you.’

As he spoke he took her hand and placed it on his body. Initially she recoiled slightly; not because the intimacy repelled her, but because she was shamingly aware that she had no real knowledge of how she should respond. That he was inviting her to caress him, to arouse him, she did know, but how? On the few, very few occasions she had tentatively attempted to touch Gregory intimately, he had pushed her away, deriding her, his rejection underlining her own inadequacy.

Her mouth went dry with the panic and despair filling her, her throat ached with the burden of her ignorance, but Matt seemed to know what she was thinking and feeling, because he covered her hand with his own, his voice comforting and reassuring as he told her, ‘I like it this way best,’ and his hand moved over her own, guiding her, teaching her.

It was like learning to dance, she discovered dizzily; once one knew the rhythm, to move to it and with it was the most easy and natural thing in the world.

‘Mm …’ Matt muttered against her mouth. ‘That’s good, Davina … so good. Let me show you.’

And then he was touching her as intimately as she was him, and her body was responding to him, her tension melting from her to be replaced by another, different kind of tautness.

It crossed her mind dizzily as his fingers moved erotically against her that she had imagined that this kind of love-play was something indulged in only by teenagers, that it was a form of intimacy scorned by adults—it was certainly not something Gregory had ever shown any inclination to do; and then, as Matt’s mouth touched her breast, she forgot about Gregory, forgot everything but the feelings Matt was arousing within her, ceasing to caress him as she lifted her hands to cling frantically to his shoulders, her back arching as the heat within her grew and Matt’s tongue licked at the dampness of her skin.

The sensation of him within her was totally different from anything she had known with Gregory. In awed wonder she experienced her body’s desire not just to accept him, but to embrace and absorb him, to urge him deeper and deeper within it to savour and encourage each powerful rhythmic thrust as the need within her built and went on building.

When he suddenly ceased moving, the shock of it made her cry out in protest, and then abruptly she realised what had happened and flushed with shame and mortification. Her body ached and pulsed still with need, but she tried to ignore it, ashamed of her wantonness in the face of Matt’s satiation, but he was still holding her, still kissing her, his hands stroking her as he slid from her.

‘It’s all right. It’s all right,’ he told her as he kissed her, and then his hand was holding her, touching her, and, while her brain was ashamed and appalled that he had recognised her need and was seeking to ease it, her frantic body achingly welcomed his awareness of its need for the fulfilment it craved.

The orgasm that engulfed her left Davina trembling and tearful, embarrassed at what it had been necessary for him to do for her, and yet at the same time overwhelmed with happy relief that he had done so.

Later, as she sat curled in his arms while they finished the wine, he told her firmly, ‘Never be afraid to tell your lover what you want from him sexually, Davina. A man wouldn’t be, and you, as a woman, as his partner, have an equal right, an equal need to enjoy fulfilment and to reach orgasm.’

He smiled a little as he saw the way she flushed.

‘Does it embarrass you when I talk so frankly? It shouldn’t. Why is it that human beings find it so comparatively easy to be physically intimate and yet so hard to tell one another vocally about the pleasure they want to give one another? Very few of us are mind-readers. Every lover that ever existed wants to know that he or she is giving pleasure.

‘It’s one thing to know that a woman is responding to you, to see it in her eyes and in her body, but when she tells you how she feels when you do this …’ He bent his head and gently licked her bare breast, covering her nipple with his mouth and suckling on it, while she tensed and gasped, not just at the unexpectedness of the gesture but at her body’s swift reaction to it.

‘You see,’ he told her as he released her. ‘I can tell from your physical reaction that my touch pleased you. But if you were to whisper to me that you loved the feel of my mouth against your skin, that it made you ache with pleasure and need to have me caressing you that way …’

His voice had grown rough and husky, and just the sound of it made her shiver, her body suddenly fiercely aroused.

‘Let me show you,’ he told her thickly. ‘Come here and kiss me, Davina, and I’ll tell you how good it makes me feel when you do.’

* * *

It was almost light when she finally left him, refusing his offer to drive her home, knowing that it would mean he would have to walk the five miles back.

‘This isn’t the end of it for us,’ he told her as he kissed her. ‘It’s just the beginning.’

‘But we don’t … we don’t love one another,’ Davina protested, shivering a little in the cold pre-dawn air, the words more a shocked acknowledgement of her own ability to enjoy him so intensely physically than because she expected or wanted any denial of her comment.

‘We are not “in love”,’ Matt corrected her. ‘But with this kind of pleasure there is always love, of a kind. You must have felt it when we touched one another. I know I did.’

He kissed her again.

‘There’s only one person whose love should ever be really important to you, Davina, and that’s your own,’ he told her.

It took her a long time to truly understand what he had meant, and she didn’t really do so until their affair was over and he had gone and she recognised what a truly wonderful gift he had given her, not just in showing her the reality of her own sexuality, but in giving her the ability to value and appreciate her own self.

They were together for the whole summer. Fate was kind to them and aided them in keeping their relationship a secret. Gregory was too engrossed in his own affair to concern himself with what she was doing, and her father, totally unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, announced that he was going to retire and spend a couple of months in Scotland golfing.

Later, when she looked back on the summer, Davina was often awed and faintly incredulous when she remembered how quickly and startlingly intensely her sensuality had developed.

Matt was intuitive as well as knowledgeable about her sex, and he encouraged her to explore her own sexuality as well as his, the desire he expressed so openly and freely for her giving her the self-confidence to lay claim to her own desires.

And then, in October, she began to notice a change in Matt. Sometimes he seemed to withdraw mentally from her and he was oddly edgy and tense.

She had always known that their affair must end, and because she had learned now to be honest with herself and with her needs and her emotions she recognised that Matt could never be wholly satisfied with the kind of life that most appealed to her. She was no traveller, no wanderer. She wanted roots, security, permanence.

At the end of October Matt told her that it was time for him to leave.

‘Owen doesn’t really have a job for me any more, and if I stay much longer …’ He looked at her, and then touched her face. ‘I’m more tempted than you know to take you with me, Davina, but my life wouldn’t be right for you, and sooner or later …’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Will it make it better or worse if I tell you that I love you?’ he asked her.

‘Better,’ Davina told him shakily, and then added ruefully, ‘And worse.’

They both laughed; something else she had learned to enjoy and share with him.

‘Don’t stay with Gregory,’ Matt urged her. ‘We both know that ultimately I couldn’t give you the things you need, but Davina, somewhere out there there is a man who can. You’ll never find him if you stay married, and you deserve to find him. You need to find him, not just for yourself, but for him and for the children the two of you will have together.’

They had one last night together, a feast of celebration of all that they had shared and a fitting way to end their affair, Davina thought. She knew already how much she would miss him, but that knowledge did not cause her to despair. She had learned so much with him, grown so much.

Leave Gregory, he had told her, and she knew that he was right, but she also knew that Gregory would not let her go easily. He could not afford to. And her father was wholly against divorce, violently disapproving of it. He would certainly not support her.

But why should she need his support? She was an adult, fully capable of directing and controlling her own life, of making her own decisions. With her father back from Scotland, fussily critical and demanding, she had little time to mourn Matt. It was only at night when she was in bed alone—she and Gregory had permanently separate rooms now—that she allowed herself the luxury of remembering, of conjuring up in the darkness the touch of his hands and the warmth of his mouth. She missed him, yes, but she accepted his going because she had always known that he would go.

And then, less than a month after Matt had gone, her father suffered his first stroke. In the months that followed, as she nursed and cared for him, Davina was forced to accept that it was not now possible for her to divorce Gregory.

The doctor told her that her father was unlikely to make a full recovery; he had become irascible and so demanding that Davina was the only person he would tolerate around him. His body might have failed him but his brain was still sharply keen and there seemed to have arisen a deep resentment between her father and Gregory. Davina, as the buffer between them, suffered the worst of their mutual aggression.

Trying to maintain some form of calm and peace was more exhausting for her than having to nurse her father and run the house, and cravenly she often wished she had had the foresight to announce her desire for a divorce before her father had had his stroke. Now it was impossible for her to leave … to escape.

With care, there was no reason why her father should not live for many more years, his doctor had told her cheerfully, and those words had snapped tight her prison gates, trapping her inside them. She could not leave her father and she could not divorce Gregory; not while her father lived.

Drearily she acknowledged that it was unlikely that Gregory would divorce her. Why should he? He enjoyed the financial security their marriage gave him. If he ever managed to gain full control of the company it might be a different story. She had heard him trying to persuade her father to give him a majority shareholding, but her father had refused. Not out of concern for her or her future, Davina recognised, but out of resentment and spite, out of his desire to ensure that he maintained some form of control over Gregory.

‘Why the hell doesn’t he just die?’ Gregory had demanded viciously after a particularly violent argument with him, but in the end Gregory himself had barely survived her father by more than a year.

And now, with both of them gone, she had the freedom she had once craved, or at least she would have had it had it not been for Carey’s.

Freedom. Did anyone really have it? Davina wondered as she dragged her thoughts wearily from the past.

That man this evening, did he have it? There had been a solitariness about him, an aloneness, but somehow it had been a solitude that spoke of a certain grimness and austerity rather than the carefree warmth she had always associated with Matt.

So why had he so immediately and so alarmingly reminded her of Matt? Surely not just because he had touched her body?

The thought disturbed her. Why should his touch, the casual, clinical touch of a stranger, have anything to do with Matt, her lover, a man with whom she had shared every sensual intimacy? There had been nothing sensual about that man tonight. On the contrary, however, her heartbeat jerked unevenly as though in betrayal of her self-deception.

There had been something; something which her body had recognised even if her brain refused to accept its existence.

She moved uncomfortably, physically shying away from her own thoughts, disliking the idea of her body’s being sexually aware, however briefly and subconsciously, of that of an unknown man, irritated and alarmed by this sudden unwanted reinforcement of her sexuality.

Perhaps it was some kind of displacement effect, she decided grimly; her friendship with Lucy and her own moral code made it impossible for her to respond to Giles’s as yet undeclared desire for her, so perhaps she had somehow become over-sexually aware of that man tonight as some form of compensation.

Or perhaps she was simply using his unwanted intrusion as a means of deflecting her attention from the far more serious problems she had to contend with. Like the future of Carey’s and those who worked there. The union officials had made it clear that they were anxious to know what was going on, and she couldn’t blame them, but both Giles and the bank had warned her that, once she publicly admitted that the company could not continue in business for much longer, she would find it even harder to find a buyer. For that reason Giles and the bank had warned her that she must keep up the pretence that the company’s future was secure.

Davina hated imposing that kind of deception on the workforce. They had a right to know what was happening, to have the opportunity to look around for other jobs.

Not that they were likely to find any. There was no other major employer in the area, which was why Carey’s had been able to get away with paying such low wages and imposing such poor and sometimes dangerous working conditions on its employees, Davina recognised. Guiltily she closed her eyes. She had been appalled when she visited the factory after Gregory’s death to discover just what conditions their employees were working under.

When she had in all innocence and outrage questioned them she had been informed grimly by one of the foremen that he had complained on any number of occasions in the past to Gregory personally about the physical danger of their working conditions, never mind the aesthetic unpleasantness of them.

Davina had flushed with mortification as she listened to him. She was as much to blame as Gregory, she decided. She should not have accepted his ruling that he was the one running Carey’s, nor his insistence that his business and his personal life were to be kept strictly separate and that that included her having nothing whatsoever to do with the day-to-day running of the company.

She had her dividends and her shareholding, and that was all she needed to concern herself with, he had told her dictatorially, and because she had hated the uselessness of arguing with him she had weakly allowed him to have his way.

She ought to have been stronger, more insistent … she ought to have been more concerned; she ought simply to have been far more responsible, and it was no good making excuses for herself now by going over and over all the reasons why she had just never realised that in taking the easy option for herself she had wantonly condemned many, many other people to Gregory’s domination and abuse.

She wasn’t going to allow it to continue, though. In her desk at home was a document she had roughed out and drawn up herself, outlining all the improvements she considered essential to provide Carey Chemicals’ employees with not merely adequate but good working conditions, the kind of working conditions she would want to work under herself; the kind of working conditions that showed respect for their employees as human beings.

Attention to the safety aspects of their work was at the top of her list, but there were other things on it as well: a decent canteen; clean, attractive rest-rooms and wash-rooms; better social facilities to engender a good relationship between company and employees that extended into leisure activities; and, most important of all, good crèche and nursery-school facilities for those employees with under-school-age children.

Davina had said nothing of this charter to either Giles or the bank, but she was determined that she would not sell the company until she was sure that any prospective buyer was agreeable to putting her proposals into effect.

She would rather sell the company for a pittance and secure these benefits for its employees than sell it at a profit to herself. It was, after all, the least she could do for those to whom she owed such a heavy debt of responsibility and neglect. However, she accepted that Giles and the bank were unlikely to share her views.

No matter. They must learn to share them, she decided firmly. After all, the company belonged to her, and it was up to her now to stand firm, to be strong and determined on behalf of everyone who worked for her, if only to make up in some part for her weakness in the past.

Matt had once told her teasingly that she had a very Calvanistic moral outlook: every debt to be repaid, every promise to be honoured.

Matt. He had given her so much. Taught her so much.

‘You know now what it means to be a woman, Davina,’ he had told her before he left. ‘Don’t waste that knowledge, and most of all don’t waste your womanhood. Find a man who will love you as you deserve to be loved.’

She hadn’t done so, of course. How could she? Her father’s stroke had kept her chained to Gregory and their marriage. Find a man … She laughed a little savagely. What she needed to find right now was not a potential lover but a buyer for Carey’s. Please God, let there be one. Not for her … but for all those who depended on the company for their living.

The phone rang, the sharp, demanding sound sending a thrill of tension along her nerve-endings. She stared at it for several seconds before reaching for the receiver, glancing at the clock as she did so. It was late, gone midnight. Who could be calling her at this time of night?

‘Davina?’

Her muscles tensed even harder as she recognised Giles’s voice. He was breathing slightly heavily, as though he had either been running or was under some kind of strain.

‘Giles.’ She said his name awkwardly, uncomfortably aware of the contradictory messages flashing from her brain.

‘Davina … I need to see you … to talk to you.’

Her heart raced as she recognised the husky, aching need in his voice. She couldn’t allow him to come round now. Not while she was feeling so emotionally and physically vulnerable, not with her body still soft and aching slightly from her memories of Matt. It was too dangerous.

‘Not now, Giles,’ she told him huskily. ‘It’s late and I was just on my way to bed.’

She could almost feel his disappointment, her fingers clenching as she gripped the receiver. Would it really do any harm to let him come round? He was obviously very distressed. Both of them were adults. She knew that he was married.

Fiercely she pushed aside the shallow excuses, quietly saying goodnight and replacing the receiver before Giles could plead with her to change her mind.

It was all his fault … that man tonight … If he hadn’t set her off thinking about Matt … remembering … She shuddered, folding her arms around her body.

She wasn’t going to allow herself to be drawn into an affair with Giles simply because her body was aching to be touched … to be loved; simply because tonight, when a strange man had held her, she had suddenly remembered exactly how it felt to be held by a man who desired her and whom she desired in return … was she?